An American came to stay – and completely changed my attitude to water - As Europe gets hotter (not good, sure, but:), hopefully they’ll understand the pleasure of ice water.

Developer Content That Ranks in 2024 - Educational content attracts the most attention (“how to”). Also content where you define things (“what is”). Converting that content into sales, or at least pipeline, is the secret magic.

How public intellectuals can extend their shelf lives - Spend a lot of time steering yourself to be optimistic, and engineer a continuous drip of new ideas and perspectives.

C-suite enthusiasm over generative AI wanes, putting pressure on quick wins - “Interest in the [AI] technology fell 11 percentage points among senior executives and eight percentage points among board of directors, respectively, since Deloitte’s Q1 2024 survey.” // I think the people most enthusiastic about enterprise AI haven’t actually used even enough consumer AI to get a grasp on how little AI can actually do. And, as with new tech (like cloud computing in the early 2010’s), they underestimate how expensive it is to use, and how difficult it is the change how their organization functions. // Also, there’s a bit danger that the AI-driven company valuations jumps too quickly drop due to lowered expectations.

IDC’s Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending – Industry Outlook - “IDC has recently unveiled the latest release of its Worldwide AI and Generative AI Spending Guide, 2024 V2. Presently, the global Artificial Intelligence market stands at nearly $235 billion, with projections indicating a rise to over $631 billion by 2028.” // Something is weird with this estimate. There’s no way companies found an extra $235 billion to spent on new IT projects. And if they’re reallocating that money from other IT projects, like, your grocery buying app is going to stop working because there’s no budget for the computer needed to run it.

Private Cloud - What’s in a Name? - “Forrester’s “Private Cloud Market Insights, 2023” reporting that 79% of surveyed cloud decision makers are implementing internal private clouds” (Source: ​​"Private Cloud Market Insights, 2023," Forrester).

AI may be distracting organizations from other IT priorities - Well, things are getting better, but enterprise AI is a distraction from keeping the lights on. // “IBM reports that fewer than half of the respondents believe their IT organization is effective in delivering basic services, compared to 69 percent from a survey in 2013. Among chief execs, that figure is 36 percent today, down from 64 percent previously, while for chief financial officers, the figures are 50 percent now, down from 60 percent before…. What might be causing this? The Armonk-based biz says that 43 percent of surveyed tech CxOs indicated that concerns about their IT infrastructure have increased over the past six months due to the focus on optimizing their infrastructure for generative AI."

Are you at a large organization doing platform engineering? Have you been building and/or using a platform? How are you introducing product management in your operations group?

I want to test a theory that’s come up in my conversations a lot this summer: introducing product management into ops and infrastructure organizations is too difficult. It won’t work. There are teams here and there that can do it, and they show up at conferences. But, when you're proposing that you're going to "change the culture" of thousands of large organizations, it's an impossible task. These detractors cite DevOps, even agile: after all these years, have we really done much, or have we just experienced the bad parts of Larman’s Laws?

That sentiment is pretty bleek!

If you're working in one of these large organizations, how do you start up the product management practices and roles for your platform? Is it working? A further filter is: how many apps are you running on your platform, following platform engineering practices?

I really would like to hear from you, even if it's just references to other people talking about. But, if you're working on platform engineering in a large organization, I especially want to hear from you. Hopefully, I can get enough responses to write-up how people are introducing and doing the product management part of platform engineering.

Now, here’s a long explanation of why I’d like to hear from you:

Product management is what makes platform engineering different than "what we're already doing"

I'm focusing on product management because I believe that practicing product management is what separates platform engineering from "what we're already doing." And, over the past year, this feels like it's emerged as the consensus. Once you make product management part of platform engineering, it moves the phrase past being a marketing-driven buzzword that relabels what we already have to focus people on buying new bottle for their old wine.

Product management wasn't always part of platform engineering. A few years ago when the thought leadership around platform engineering started, "platform engineering" just meant putting an internal developer portal in place (Backstage and friends). Then the platform engineering thought leadership train loaded up "making Kubernetes easier to use for developers." This caused a lot of existential angst from us DevOps and PaaS people, especially when Humanitec declared that DevOps was dead. We were all left wondering: how is this different than what we've been talking about for 15+ years? That is: what we’re already doing.

Once the 10+ year old idea of "platform as a product" was reintroduced into the platform conversation, "platform engineering" became a new enough thing that it was worthy of having its own name. It became a thing.

In my world of pre-Kubernetes PaaS, I've worked with large organizations who've been practicing platform as a product for many years, using Cloud Foundry as their platform. You could say that platform engineering is “just” a re-labeling of platform as a product, but I think it’s ended up being more than that. Platform engineering wants to do platform as a product with Kubernetes, not with existing PaaSes.1

Platform engineering focuses too much on Kubernetes

This is the second aspect of platform engineering that I think makes platform engineering a real thing: it means using Kuberntes as the basis for your platform. I don't think this is good, and I’d rather we change it so that it doesn't matter what CaaS/IaaS you use. But, that’s currently platform engineering as she is spoken.

Like I said, for 10+ years, there've been a lot of big enterprises that have used, and continue to use, Cloud Foundry to run thousands upon thousands of real-world applications. And, there's other platforms out there, not to mention all of the VM-based ways of running apps that seems to be the majority of how people run apps. There is always a platform, whether you know it or not. And if you don’t know it, it usually means its an accidental platform and hundreds of them in your organization, which is very much not good.

But, the people building and talking about platforms now want Kubernetes, it seems. They just assume there is nothing else. This has been a 7 year distraction from improving how organizations develop and run software, and a great example of how us tech people get too focused on using new and interesting tools for their own sake. And, in that way, a triumph of thought leadership and devrel.

Over those years, after finally focusing everyone on the PaaS layer, that re-focusing on the CaaS/IaaS layer has sacrificed the never ending task of improving the "business outcomes" of better developer productivity and improving all the -ility's in production. You know: becoming an "elite performer" in DORA terms.2

(Alright. I've tried to write this post a few times and it always goes dark and negative. So I'll stop it with the you kids get off my lawn existential crap.)

So, that's where we are with platform engineering: it's applying product management to building the platform, and building the platform with Kubernetes.

The two platform approaches we'll end up with

There's all sorts of people working on solving the Kubernetes problem(s): that it's complex, you don't want to expose developers to it, and you have to go to the buffet and assemble and then care for your own platform. Kubernetes is not a ready to use out of the box platform. Indeed, when you look at the CNCF cloud native platform definition, Kubernetes doesn’t even show up!

Following historic examples, the problem with building a platform from Kubernetes will resolve itself in two ways:

The Overlay: platform as abstraction layer

There will be a few winners in the "wrap Kubernetes/whatever in layer to hide it from the users" approach. This is what we're trying to do with the App Engine/Spaces framework, and, as I shallowly understand it, it's what Syntasso/Kratix is trying to do. You’re essentially saying “the APIs and config for Kubernetes aren’t tuned for the platform engineer needs, so we’re going to make the ones that are, and do all the glue work integrate that back to Kubernetes.” This is one of the most popular patterns in computering: adding an abstraction layer to make it easier to use the wrapped layer.

This platform building pattern is trying to give users (platform engineers) the ability to customize the platform to their special needs3 while still avoiding building everything from scratch, the “DIY platform.” To use PaaS-talk, this approach allows you to form your own opinions rather than (be forced to) use the opinions of your pre-built platform.

Platform engineers define the "API" of the platform components and can then build the platform out of those components. You can also throw in promise theory, contracts, and some aspects of negotiated platforms and SLOs from SRE-think. Colin Humphreys made a good pitch for this approach recently, and I’ve been dragging my feet on interviewing the Tanzu people who’re working on this approach. 

We've seen what this ends up looking, good and bad, like in historic examples, so we can start to think through some long-horizon strategy moves.

DevOps 1.0 was all about creating an abstraction layer for the mess of configuration and release management with Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, etc. Years later, DevOps got bogged down in solving ops tooling and culture problems (which is great!) and rarely got up to the application developer layer - but, the intention was (usually) always there!

Then there's our current example of Kubernetes. The point of Kubernetes was to displace AWS as the standard IaaS model by creating an open standard for how infrastructure was represented, managed, and used. To use the Kubernetes term, to creat a new “API” for IaaS. It worked!

Like DevOps, Kubernetes also stalled out on the way to delivering a better developer experience. And, in fact, the Kubernetes creators eventually backed off from that ever having been a goal.

For both Kubernetes and DevOps, making the “inner loop” (if you remember that term) better was, perhaps, never the point, and thinking otherwise resulted in over-inflated expectations.

I think what the people working on the platform as abstraction layer approach want is what we hoped the Kubernetes API would be: much higher up the stack, even developer facing, and including a governance framework. Essentially, a developer-ready system with all the enterprise grade blah-blah tools.

This is great! It'll be fantastic if it works!

What’s important is that you have to product manage all of this to figuring out (1) what those overlays are, (2) how you customize the overlays for your environment, (3) how you pick and choose which overlays to assemble into a platform, and (4) when you add in new functionality.

The vendor and open source community around the overlay will help with some of that, especially number one and four. The vendor/community will gladly tell you what it thinks the defaults should be and even provide you an out of the box, ready to use enterprise grade blah blah platform (see the next section) based on those overlays.

But, the whole point of the platform as abstraction layer is customizing the platform to the user’s needs, so, like, the user needs to do that. And product management is how you do that.

Paas is cool again

Since 2007 we've been through several cycles of people trying to build their own Heroku.

It goes like this:

1. A new platform comes out that makes it easy for developers to build their app, connect the app to a database, etc., deploy the app to production, and scale it for performance needs all on their own, self-service, using the latest frameworks and services.

2. It only runs in the public cloud.

3. Large organizations initially reject it for two reasons: (a) it actually will not scale. (b) it needs to be on-premises for very important enterprise reasons. "We want that awesome developer experience and velocity," the large organizations say, "but, uh," looks down at notes, "I was told that we work in a 'highly regulated industry.'"

4. This brings in phase two of the cycle: vendors make on-premises platforms. Strangely, maybe even heroically, Heroku never entered this phase. But, you saw it with things like the container wars of the 2010's, which drove on-premises platforms like Cloud Foundry.

5. Our attention goes back down the stack to infrastructure instead of the fully build PaaS. PaaS is no longer cool. The last phase of the cycle is usually caused by a disruptive technology coming along and pulling the user and buyer's attention away form the now boring platform that just works. Docker was the first to disrupt PaaSes in the late 2010s, and then Kubernetes came in. In both cases, the user assumptions was that each was a viable PaaS replacement. But, as capital-D Disruption, in each case, neither was a full-on replacement for all the enterprise grade blah blah. And yet, these less feature-ful disruptors drove organizations away from the PaaSes that they once loved. E.g., Heroku and its children.

I've made a satire out of that cycle and the thousands of highly paid professionals who make those decisions along the way.

But, I mean: I'm not sure why people don't just use Heroku or its many on-premises focused descendants like Cloud Foundry.

There's "fashion." People wanting to use something new. I've heard this sentiment many times recently: "Our PaaS is great, but if I don't learn Kubernetes, it'll be harder to find a new job. So, we need to migrate to Kubernetes." What with enterprise Kubernetes build -out being just at the beginning, that sentiment is optimized for an individual, but not for the organization that already has something that works in place.

Other than "fashion," I think what drives people away from PaaSes is: 

1. Pricing - The first grumblings about Heroku were that it was awesome, but expensive. This has been a common sentiment about all PaaSes. Showing the value of any platform is hard, so it always looks expensive when you start running thousands of applications. All you see is a price, and linking it to the revenue that those thousands of apps drive is not a normal way for traditional organizations to think. They treat IT as a cost center, not a part of the business. So when someone comes and says "we could build that platform ourselves and remove however many millions in licensing/cloud cost," management gets excited.

2. Difficulty in customizing or "swapping out" components, and lack of new features. The last is what introducing product management into platforms is trying to solve: you're actually supposed to talk with developers and deliver new platform features that solve their problems and make them happier.

In this part of the cycle, the Kubernetes problem is solved by hiding or even removing Kubernetes. It doesn’t matter what CaaS/IaaS is at the bottom of the PaaS. Maybe there’s even two, or three! You might even introduce a totally a new compute, uh, “paradigm.” Maybe serverless will finally fulfill those Wardley-dreams! Unikernal, WASM - whatever! Just a few weeks ago my mind was thoroughly exfoliated in the sauna with the idea of Isolate Cloud. ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN.

The role of product management here is different. If you’re using a PaaS, you’re not given a lot of tools to do all of your own customization. You more rely on the PaaS vendor and community to do much of that work. The overall community does most of the product managering, which mans they need to do a lot of it. It also means you need to upgrade the PaaS when there are new versions. That is a big challenge. People at large organizations don’t like upgrading their stacks.

Maybe one way of looking at it is that a PaaS outsources platform product management. It’s probably more that what you’re product managing is (like the platform as abstraction layer) the selection and assembly of pre-built components.

Without product management, platform engineering will struggle

This is why I've typed this far: the long-term success of platforms relies on product management. Once you stop adding new features to the platform, people look for new options. If you can't customize it to your needs (real or just made up enterprise blah blah), you'll start the platform cycle all over again. This means you don't get the full benefits of many years of platforming. You'll start neglecting what you have, focus on migrating your existing apps to new ones, and experience those ups and downs of benefits achieved when you see surveys of new tech usage. ROI depends on years of payback, and if you restart in the middle of that period, the math doesn't work.

So! That's what’s driving my interest in learning how organizations are introducing and sustaining product management in their platform groups.

How's it going for you?

Logoff

Colophon

Three things go me thinking on this above, which I want to call out:

First, this from Figma’s write-up of migrating to Kubernetes:

Having users define services directly in YAML can be confusing. Instead, we worked to define a golden path for users and allow customization for special cases. By being explicit about what users can and should customize—and otherwise enforcing consistency by default—you’ll save users time and energy while also simplifying maintenance and future changes.

That seems like a pretty compact explanation of the developer-facing goals of platform engineering.

Second, as referenced many times above, Colin’s excellent piece of “let’s make better mistakes this time” for platform engineering enthusiasts. I like that he managed to sneak in a link to an old version of Pivotal paper on platform engineering.

Third, Betty announced that she’s the new CMO at Heroku. When I was looking around at new job opportunities this summer, almost every person told me I should talk to the new people at Heroku. They’re trying to get the band back together, etc. I don’t really know anyone there, and I decided that my current job is just fine. But, it’s exciting to think that Heroku will start doing more in the platform area. I think the timing is right for a public PaaS only play - you’d be cutting out a lot of enterprise customers, but over the next five years, I think all that enterprise blah blah will be less of a barrier. I mean, that’s what all the CIOs are saying: in three years they’re planning to almost double the amount of workloads in public cloud. Maybe they’ll actually do it this time.

While writing this, I came across this huge write-up of platform engineering ahead of releasing a new book on the topic. It’s great! I’m looking forward to that book.

Also, we have our big annual conference next week. I’m thinking we’ll have some options about the above. You can watch some of it as a live stream, or scrounge for coverage and videos later. I’ll write-up anything relevant here. Probably.

There’s something I chopped out of my initial, thankfully thrown away draft of all this: we don’t really talk about “operator experience” in platform engineering. It’s very developer focused. This is fine! But, more than likely (as with DevOps), the story will turn inward to making the tools and lives of platform engineers better. Put another way, we’ve long had the 12 factor app manifesto, but what is the other side of that, the 12 factor platform manifesto?

Figuring out what kind of podcast you’re doing

One of my co-workers is started a podcast and had some questions. Here’s my answers. As with most “how do I do this?” sessions, it focuses a lot on gear which I scoot away from in my answers, you know, following the cliche that the tools matter less than what you do with them. Also, the tools are tedious, but easy to learn.

What podcasting software do you use?

This is all for recording remotely, over the Internet. For recording in person, there’s a different set of gear and practices.

For SoftwareDefinedTalk.com we use Restream. When I’m recording an interview, I use SquadCast which is now bundled in Descript subscriptions.

I suggest using one of those services so that you can record separate audio tracks and get video (whether you want the video or not). You don’t need to livestream your recordings.

Before those services existed, I’d use Audio Hijack Pro to record the incoming audio and outgoing (my) audio. But that’s a lot of work compared to just using one of the above. You can also use Zoom. I think it’s pretty good, actually, but I haven’t checked it out recently.

What are the features of that software?

Recording.

The main thing each does is get a video chat going and record separate audio tracks. Most of them, now, will record the audio locally (on your and your guests laptop) as well. So, if the connection is bad, you’ll get good audio in the final recording. These services usually will give you recordings of each participant and a recording with them all together.

Editing

For Software Defined Talk used Hindenburg for many years (ten?!). It’s at the sweet spot between lots of functionality and easy to learn and use. It’s built around editing voice, has good, basic audio filters and effects (leveling, noise reduction, etc.), and good setting for exporting podcast MP3s (setting cover art, putting in chapters, etc.) It looks like it had editing by transcript.

Now-a-days when I edit podcasts I do it in Descript. You can edit the video (or just audio) and export an audio only MP3. It has all of the export things that Hindenburg does.

If you want a free option, Audacity is probably pretty good. That’s what I used long ago in the 2000s and it was just fine.

Distributing

Here, I assume you mean hosting a podcast: uploading it somewhere so that it makes an RSS feed that people can subscribe to.

In addition to hosting the MP3 and creating the RSS feed, the service should create a basic podcast website for you. You want an index page that lists each episode and then each episode should have its own page, the show notes. You want to be able to edit those show notes to put whatever you want in there. The service should allow you to automate all of this each time you upload an episode.

Each episode should have a URL you can go to. The better services will automatically create a URL based on the episode number, for example: https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/480.

These services should also have metrics too for episode downloads. You can’t tell much from podcast downloads: just number of downloads and geography. Some of the nicer services will pull in more detailed metrics from Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

I’d also look for a platform that manages your podcast listing in Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can actually do that on your own, but many of the services will do that for you.

We use fireside.fm. My co-workers use podbean.com and transistor.fm. I haven’t used it in a long time, but libsyn.com is one of the original hosters and probably good.

A lot of big name, highly professional podcasts (the NPR style below) have terrible show notes. It can be hard to even find where the show notes are. This is baffling. Have show notes and good ones. Check out the example podcasts I cite below, they all have good show note sites…except the most professional one! Here is the test: if a person wanted to link to an episode, is it easy for them to find the web page (does it even exist?!) and get a URL that they can share?

Do you edit your podcasts? If so, any advice?

I don’t edit the Software Defined Talk ones anymore, one of my co-hosts (Brandon) does. But I used to for 10+ years. Plus, I edit the Tanzu ones and one-off ones I do. Brandon is a much better editor than I am.

Learning the basics of editing take a little bit of time, but it’s basically chopping up your audio file into chunks, arranging the chunks in the order you want, and deleting the chunks you don’t. For most podcasts that are interviews, you won’t be re-ordering the chunks. Instead, you’ll delete parts you don’t want. Most podcast editing is that: deleting parts you don’t want.

You’ll know you’ve gotten good at podcasting editing when you start to use the keyboard short cuts, and when you can imagine the edits you’d make as your talking in the podcast. As you listen to other podcasts, you’ll also be able to detect when they’ve done edits.

You can put music and standard bumpers in the intro and outro. I’m not a huge fan this as a listener or maker. If you do have music, make it brief and use the same music each time. This will help listeners slide into the comfortable sameness of each episode.

Do you have any general podcasting advice?

I would decide on the style of show you want and then edit accordingly.

Do you want (1) the full This American Life/NPR style podcast with summing up intro and hook, music in the background (“ducked”), narrator spliced in with interviewee comments, edited segments, and music? Or do you want (2) the cold open, we just recorded two people talking style? There’s an in-between that most people do where (3) they have some intro music that fades out, and maybe they do some editing of segments.

I do the second type because as a listener I don’t like the others and it’s the quickest and easiest to make.

Deciding the format and style you want is important. Once you have that you can use it to guide what you do like editing and even selecting guests. The style you choose will determine how you structure and run the podcast, and also what you’ll do during it.

If you’re doing the NPR-style, your goal is to get other people to do all the talking and edit together a story. NPR-style podcasts aren’t really podcasts at all: they’re professional radio shows that are distributed as podcasts.

If you’re doing the other two (“real podcasts”), you have to remember that listeners are as interested in you as they are in the guests and topics.

The success of “real” podcasts relies on establishing a parasocial relationships with listeners, often lasting many years. Listners want to hear the topics, learn abut things, but they also establish a friendship with the hosts. Listeners look forward to hearing what their friends are up to each week - hanging out with them each week.

This means that if you’re doing this style, if you’re interviewing someone you should interject what you think instead of just asking the guest questions. And if you’re discussing some topic, you should offer lots of opinions and “thinking outloud,” not just covering “the facts.”

Also, this means you should be consistent in your release period (weekly, every two weeks, monthly) and post it on the same day. For example, we post Software Defined Talk episode every Friday at 7:30am Amsterdam time. I know the release days for all of my favorite podcasts and look forward to them.

Here’s another distinction in types of podcasts: guests and no guests.

Having guests is having (mostly) different people on each episode to interview them about whatever - in tech, usually something they’re an expert, or at least knowledgeable on.

In these cases, you want to get the guest talking most of the time, but you should also think of yourself as a proxy for the audience to ask and clarify things that the guest is saying. It’s also good to rephrase things from time-to-time, and then, as always, offer up your own thoughts.

People have a lot of opinions about length. You should ignore that advice and figure out what you like and what works for your style. I like long podcasts, some other people like short ones. If someone tells you to target ten minutes because “people don’t listen to long podcasts,” chances are this person doesn’t listen to podcasts. This comes up a lot when you’re doing an official company podcast. Only take advice about podcast length from people who actually listen to a lot of podcasts.

There is no magic number for length. Start with having it be slightly longer than it needs to be, and back up from there if you want to.

Keep in mind that people won’t always listen to a podcast beginning to end in one sitting. They might pause it and come back to it. Sometimes it takes me two or more days to fully listen to a podcast.

Again, your listeners are there to hang-out with you each week - they’ll appreciate you spending more time with them rather than less. And, if it takes them several days to listen to it, they will because they’re interested in hanging out with you.

(4 hours might be too long, but I’ve listened to many enjoyable 3 hour podcasts over the past ₂₀ years, and hundreds of good 2 hour ones.)

As with writing, the other thing you should do is listen to a lot of other podcasts in the style you like. They can be in your topic area or a completely different one. For example, even if you’re doing a tech podcast, you can learn a lot about podcasting from The Flop House and Blank Check.

Once you’ve made three or so podcasts and edited them, you’ll be able to pick apart how good podcasters operate and start learning from them. And, also, you’ll just learn the format, and what you like. With this you can figure out the podcasting style you like and start to build - and refine/evolve - your style from that.

Here’s some more podcast example:

• The Political Gabfest - this is a very professionally done “the same people three people talk about the news of the week” podcast. You can see that they stick to a format - there’s usually three topics, the host intros/summarizes the topic and then asks the other two hosts what they think; the host will say what they think to. Also, at the end of each episode each host recommends something. I stole that idea for Software Defined Talk when we started our podcast. This is the podcast that has terrible show notes - see how frustrating it is the look at their page?

• Software Defined Talk - this my podcast, so it’s obviously the best in the world. We patterned it off The Political Gabfest, but after 10 years it’s developed its own style. I would call this style “the mess that works.” It’s the same three people each week discussing a selection of tech news and any side topics. Here, the format is: (1) Coté’s inane cold open, (2) one to two tech topics we discuss, (3) listener feedback and interesting conferences, (4) recommendations from each host, (5) usually an after show with some goofy outtakes or an extended, off-topic conversation. A more professional version of this is Sharp Tech, and the Cloudcast News of the Month.

• Oxide and Friends - this is another “mess that works” example. It is very much a personality-based podcast, based on Bryan Cantrill. The format here is the classic: his co-host Adam is the straight man and Bryan is the goofball. This is also an interesting podcast to study if you’re making tech podcasts and you’re making an official company podcast. Oxide is on an impossible mission: making on-premises hardware! So, part of their marketing is embracing the absurdity of that business scheme and somehow converting it to tech-cult energy, to hope and belief that on-premises hardware is cool and interesting. It’s like the early days of Kubernetes where Kelsey would run around doing demos. This podcast does a lot more than that, of course, but part of it is feeding that tech-cult energy.

• The Changelog - I don’t listen to this podcast much (it’s usually too technical for me), but it’s very popular. Compared to other podcasts it’s high-production.

Finally, with most of my advice about content, my number one recommendation is to just do it and publish. The moment you hesitate because you think you should edit more, polish it up, or (worst) re-do it, you should instantly click publish.

If you’re doing this right, you’ll always think the episode could be better, you might even think the episode is bad. You might even regret questions you asked, that it’s boring. Just keep publishing. It’ll take time to discover your style. Eventually, the audience will find you. But if you engineer it too much you get the equivalent of “data sheet” PDFs and shallow enterprise software web pages. Something that looks perfect, but says nothing.

Publishing the imperfect is how you get around that. As I keep emphasizing, a “real” podcast is about establishing a very intimate relationship between the hosts and listeners.

By doing it weekly and publishing it you start learning how to choreograph that all.

We plan on having guests on our show… what do you do to help guests have the best possible audio quality, especially if they’re not likely to have professional equipment?

Getting good audio from guests can be tough. The first thing is to get the to use headphones. Then having them use something other than a laptop mic. If they have a headset with a mic, that’s good. And iPhone headphones with a mic are actually pretty good; you just have to ask them to hold the mic away from their beard if they have a beard.

Very importantly: make sure they check their audio settings to make sure they’re using the good mic. If their audio sounds off, ask them to double check. I’ve been doing podcasts for about 20 years, and I mess this up as a host and guest at least once a year.

Also, experiment with using the Continuity Camera with a iPhones. The mic can be pretty good, and the placement of the phone mic on the top of their laptop screen will position the mic well, pointed at their face.

And beyond audio quality, you need to learn how to steer your guests. This is one of the things you’ll learn from listening to other podcasts. The best steerer is Tyler Cowan, though, I could see how some people would find his style insulting and cringe-y: too controlling.

And while not a guest, if you’re doing the multi-host thing, you need to learn how to be the host that runs the show and moderates it (let’s call it the active-host) but also how to be the other hosts (the passive hosts).

For the active host, on our podcast, Brandon is good at this (which happens in the episodes I’m not on), and Plotz is good at this in The Political Gabfest.

The important thing about being a passive host is that you have to stop talking when the host changes the topic. You’ll get tuned to each other, and even pick up on the natural rhythms of each other. You’ll know about ten seconds ahead of time when a person is wrapping up so you can prepare to go next.

A lot of the convention about how to be a “good listener” in life doesn’t apply to podcasting. You have unlearn polite conversation topics, and almost do all those things that people tell you are offensive and rude in meatspace talk. Interrupt each other, talk over each other, say what you think. Or not: it depends on the style you’re doing. But don’t bring all the “how to be a good listeners” and nonviolent communication stuff to the table right away: evolve to that if that ends up being your style.

In summary, what I’m saying is: finding and tuning your style of podcasting is more important than gear. Part of that is creating the your podcasting character and being conscious of playing that character. It might be a lot different than the character you are in other parts of your life. You listeners want to hear that character, they’ll become friends with it. Your listeners won’t show up just for that character: they want the actual interesting content and guests! But, that character is what will make your listeners keep listening, subscribe, and fill in the gaps between impossible awesome and what you actually published. So, you have to cultivate that character.

Relative to your interests

• Why Every Java Developer Should Attend SpringOne - the online version is free to watch on August 26th to 28th.

• Travel Spending On Track To Return To Pre-Pandemic Levels By End Of 2024 - ”Global travel spending is roaring back and will fully recover to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2024, surpassing $2 trillion.”

• Walmart used AI to crunch 850M product data points and improve CX - “The primary in-store improvement is that associates’ can use in-store technology like mobile tools to quickly locate inventory and get items on shelves or to waiting customers — a significant upgrade from the ‘treasure hunt’ of finding items in years past” A few more details here.

• Apax to take consultancy firm Thoughtworks private in $1.75 bln deal - Summary from Justin Warren: “Software consulting company Thoughtworks is getting bought by private equity firm Apax Partners for about $1.75 billion. Thoughtworks has been struggling a bit lately, with revenue down 12.4% YoY to $251.7 million and the stock down 87% since 2022. It’s already done a bunch of cost-reduction restructuring, and it looks like more is on the way with 630+ staff to go” out of ₁₀,500 staff.

Wastebook

• “billboards festooned with three-dimensional meat bearing messages such as ‘You never sausage a place!’” Here.

• It’s hard to forget a bad idea, and you have to work hard to remember good ones.

Conferences, Events, etc.

Talks I’m giving, places I’ll be, and other plans.

This year, SpringOne is free to attend and watch online. Check out Josh’s pitch for the event. There’s an on-site conference as well at Explore if you’re interested. But, for those who can’t, now you can watch all the fun!

SpringOne/VMware Explore US, August 26–29. DevOpsDays Antwerp, 15th anniversary, speaking, September 4th-5th. SREday London 2024, speaking, September 19th to 20th. Cloud Foundry Day EU, Karlsruhe, Oct 9th. VMware Explore Barcelona, speaking, Nov 4th to 7th.

Discounts! SREDay London: 20% off with the code SRE20DAY. Cloud Foundry Day 20% off with the code CFEU24VMW20.

Logoff

I’ve spent a lot of time “researching” and learning this week, not much producing content. It’s like input versus output. This is difficult, mentally for me. I only value publishing, so if I’m not doing it, I don’t think I’ve done much work. This is not healthy!

To get around that by thinking about what other creators do. How often do they publish? How much time do they spend “puttering around” building up to the ideas they eventually publish. How much stuff do they work on that never gets published.

When I’m in this learning mode, I’m creating lots of content: I’m taking notes, trying to rewrite things. I’m also talking with other people a lot, testing out my understanding of the “input,” getting them to explain it to me, thinking about things we could do as output. It’s sort of like a podcast that never gets published.

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Part of that “input mode” is listening to lots of videos. I can’t watch videos at my desk. I’ll get distracted with other work and then I’m no longer paying attention. This a good opportunity to walk the dog on long dog walks. So, this week, I’ve found several new Garbage Chairs of Amsterdam.

Walmart used AI to crunch 850M product data points and improve CX - “The primary in-store improvement is that associates’ can use in-store technology like mobile tools to quickly locate inventory and get items on shelves or to waiting customers — a significant upgrade from the ‘treasure hunt’ of finding items in years past”